Review: Zone of Interest is the "Banality of Evil" film adaptation we’ve all been waiting for

It’s certainly not better.

Passive agreement?

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I think they are equally bad but I respect differing opinions.

If you say so; to each their own.

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I just watched the trailers. Definitely looks like a haunting watch.

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It is what it is. A ‘normal’ family with a father who isn’t particularly remarkable, one could even say prosaic. He just happens to be the commandant of Auschwitz. A post he held for some time and was responsible for the highest number of dead out of all the camps. My problem with the film is that I had not long finished the novel ( Martin Amis) when I discovered an adaptation was on the way from Jonathon Glazer. I loved Under The Skin. The idea that we watch the parochial day-to-day existence of the family whilst thousands are being murdered over a garden wall is in every frame. In its way it becomes banal. It’s beautifully crafted. The sound is fantastic, the music, visually it’s impeccable. It is a series of vivid tableaux.
There are arresting moments ( the girl putting food in the ground for starving prisoners to find for example, finding human remains in the river that his kids are bathing in), but without a narrative drive, it’s hard to engage with emotionally. It seems as if that one idea was taken from the book and everything else discarded. It’s still a great movie. I will definitely be rewatching it. It deserves attention for sure.

Which is very much not a normal thing. Raising a family next door to a facility dedicated to mass murder is not a normal thing. :woman_shrugging:

I don’t know, people acting “normal” while they know what is happening next door sounds like it would cause some major emotions in me. YMMV, I guess.

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Saw a couple of days ago. Haunting. The sound design made me crawl out of my skin. It is a masterful, horrifying study of denial. It is worth seeing in a theater with good sound.

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Nonexistent in my area. Even at the “fancy” one with the reclining seats and menu service, everything sounds simultaneously loud and muffled, not like they would show this movie anyway. I checked the local listings and was surprised that any theater picked it up—two showings on Sunday (one in the afternoon, one at 10PM) at the older uncomfortable multiplex.

Related from Cory’a Pluralistic today

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/28/5000-bats/#charnel-house

“ Last year, Tkacic wrote about the history of IG Farben, the German company that built Monowitz, a private slave-labor camp up the road from Auschwitz to make the materiel it was gouging Hitler’s Wehrmacht on:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

Farben bought the cheapest possible slaves from Auschwitz, preferentially sourcing women and children. These slaves were worked to death at a rate that put Auschwitz’s wholesale murder in the shade. Farben’s slaves died an average of just three months after starting work at Monowitz. The situation was so abominable, so unconscionable, that the SS officers who provided outsource guard-labor to Monowitz actually wrote to Berlin to complain about the cruelty.

The Nuremberg trials are famous for the Nazi officers who insisted that they were “just following order” but were nonetheless executed for their crimes. 24 Farben executives were also tried at Nuremberg, where they offered a very different defense: “We had a fiduciary duty to our shareholders to maximize our profits.” 19 of the 24 were acquitted on that basis.

PE is committed to an ideology that is far worse than any form of racial animus or other bias. As a sector, it is committed to profit above all other values. As a result, its brutality knows no bounds, no decency, no compassion. Even the worst crimes we commit for hate are nothing compared to the crimes we commit for greed.”

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Angry Star Trek GIF

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